About Early Math Counts

Closing the
math achievement gap

In 2012, the University of Illinois Chicago College of Education launched the Math at Home (now Early Math Counts) website with a grant from the CME Group Foundation to give early childhood educators in Illinois the knowledge and skills they need to boost children’s mastery of early math.

The CME Group Foundation provided additional funding in 2016 to support the development of Early Math Counts—a free, online professional development program for early childhood educators across the nation.

Since that time, thousands of early childhood professionals have visited our website each month and enrolled in our Early Math Counts professional development series to learn how to integrate math into their early learning environments and activities.

Early Math Counts has four core objectives:
  1. To give early childhood educators the knowledge and skills they need to teach early math
  2. To help early childhood educators set up environments that promote math literacy
  3. To provide math activities and lessons that foster the development of early math skills
  4. To help create a world of math-literate children

Questions or comments? Please contact us at info@earlymathcounts.org.


About the University of Illinois Chicago

The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a community of scholars committed to educational equity and social, political and economic parity. UIC develops new knowledge about education that improves teaching, learning and assessment; informs policy and practice; and is valued by the communities that it serves. The university directs its teaching, research and public service to all learners, with an emphasis on learners in urban environments.

About the UIC College of Education

The College of Education at the University of Illinois Chicago strives to prepare the next generation of educators, educational leaders and educational researchers to establish equity in Chicago public schools. Making good on the promise of public education requires us to acknowledge and address the problems of inequality explicitly and courageously, so that the public education system can help all children achieve their full potential.

About the CME Group Foundation

The CME Group Foundation was created in 2008 and endowed with a gift of $16 million from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Trust. The Foundation works to advance the economy by supporting education from cradle to career, primarily in the Chicago region. CME’s early education funding is largely centered on its Early Math Education Initiative, which aims to improve math skills in the birth-through-third-grade demographic.